The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [103]
Hubble's and Shapley's employment at Mount Wilson overlapped for about a year and a half, until Shapley moved to Harvard. Their relationship over that brief period, though, could hardly be called collegial. Both were from the heartland of America, but they might as well have been born continents apart. Hubble cultivated an air of sophistication and restraint around his colleagues. The cold and standoffish persona of his youth never went away. Hubble kept his distance and maintained a regal air. With his ever-present pipe, he would occasionally blow smoke rings out into the room or flip his lighted match and catch it, still alight, as it came down. As other astronomers put it, he was a “stuffed shirt,” who couldn't “write an inter-office memo without it sounding like the Preamble to the Constitution.” Shapley, on the other hand, retained his brassy and chummy country ways. Hubble's affectation for wearing jodhpurs, leather puttees, and a beret while observing or going around and saying “Bah Jove” was simply too much for Shapley to bear. An unadorned “Missourian tongue” was good enough for him. The fact that Shapley was a close friend of Adriaan van Maanen's made it even more difficult for the two midwesterners to cozy up. “Hubble disliked van Maanen from the time he himself arrived on Mount Wilson; he scorned him,” claimed Shapley years later. It may have been because van Maanen, more senior than Hubble, openly displayed his jealousy at having to share time on the 100-inch. To Shapley, though, “Hubble just didn't like people. He didn't associate with them, didn't care to work with them.”
Edwin Hubble wearing his knickers on Mount Wilson
(Courtesy of the Archives, California Institute of Technology)
Part of the coolness and tension between Hubble and Shapley had to do with their differing experiences during the war. Hubble had immediately volunteered, putting his professional life on hold and taking the risk that his research would be taken up by others. Shapley, who hated war, remained at Mount Wilson—the “conscientious slacker”—weakly suggesting that Hale convinced him to stay and taking on work that Hubble had hoped to tackle, such as the globular clusters. But, fortunately for Hubble, analyzing the mysterious nebulae was still a wide-open field when he returned from overseas. And once Shapley left for Harvard, Hubble at last had the chance to step out of the formidable shadow Shapley, then the golden boy of astronomy, had been casting on Mount Wilson.
Hubble first carried out an extensive study of the diffuse nebulae within the Milky Way, identifying the various types and describing the sources of their luminosity. But he also kept track of the “non-galactic nebulae” that he came across as he carried out this research. Hubble's sympathies certainly leaned toward the island-universe theory. When he was a graduate student at Yerkes he especially noted that the high velocities of the spiral nebulae “lend some color to the hypothesis that the spirals are stellar systems at distances to be measured often in millions of light-years.” But he became more circumspect once he became a staff member at Mount Wilson, at least in print. Caution became his byword. He emphasized in a 1922 Astrophysical Journal paper that the term non-galactic didn't mean the spirals were necessarily “outside our galaxy” but that these nebulae tended to avoid the galactic plane. At this point, Hubble's publications no longer contained grand references to island universes or other galaxies, as those of Heber Curtis and Vesto Slipher were doing. Hubble started to keep his words fairly neutral, adopting the